Tag: JNU

The Burning of Lyons

letters-from-a-stoic-original-imaefcp7sbhzqx68I have stopped relying on serendipity; this has been replaced over the years by a firm belief in the hidden hand that unbeknownst to me puts things in my way, gives subtle signs, and guides me forward.

A case in point was a chance reading of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, an unlikely book for me to pick up early on a winter’s morning. Of course it might be said that a cold, foggy, and bleak morning is precisely the time to read about stoicism, but flipping through the pages, I came across his Letter 91, On the Lesson to be Drawn from the Burning of Lyons. The power of his writing aside, I am sorely tempted by the allegorical these days where everything is a metaphor for something else, something more immediate and more relevant.

The burning of Lyons so many centuries ago … the arson attacks on our public institutions … the erosion of trust, the destruction of edifices constructed with so much effort … all as one.

The value of reading Seneca is not just to draw moral lessons from the stoic philosophy, to control anger and passion in the face of so much provocation, but also to draw upon that wisdom and the hopes infused in that letter, written so many years ago.

The calamity, the fire that has wiped out the colony of Lyons, becomes in these days the calamity that has destroyed a great University, a great public institution. As Seneca says of the burning of Lyons, “Such a calamity might upset anyone at all, not to speak of a man who dearly loves his country. But this incident has served to make him inquire about the strength of his own character, which he has trained, I suppose, just to meet situations that he thought might cause him fear. I do not wonder, however, that he was free from apprehension touching an evil so unexpected and practically unheard of as this, since it is without precedent. […] Fortune has usually allowed all men, when she has assailed them collectively, to have a foreboding of that which they were destined to suffer.“

Somehow, we have all been just as unprepared for an evil so unexpected. So many great schools, to rewrite the Senecan text, any one of which would make a single institution famous, were wrecked in one term and with so little foreboding. And the strangeness of it all, the obscurity of purpose, adds immeasurably to the weight of this calamity, the death of a University.

Of course I talk of our public Universitites, JNU in particular, of which I have talked earlier, and am not able to not talk about either. I continue to be surprised by the rapidity with which the spirit of the University has been crushed. Not for this institution, arguably a fine and great creation, “to be granted a period of reprieve before its fall.”

And the effect of this conflagration will last long – those who remember the old Lyons will not forget those who helped burn it down. And they, the ones that burn it now will not be able to forget what they have done.chance

As Seneca says, “nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. […] Chance chooses some new weapon by which to bring her strength to bear against us, thinking we have forgotten her.”

Stoicism therefore seems a wise strategy to follow. In the past few years, every time one has thought that the worst was over, some new horror has been thrust upon us. We should, as Seneca notes, therefore reflect upon all contingencies, and should fortify our minds against the evils which may possibly come.

Like Machiavelli’s or Kautilya’s, some of Seneca’s writings are lessons in leadership, notably his advice to Nero, On Mercy. And there are bits of this essay that advise leaders, as well as others. Commenting on the rapidity with which disastrous changes can be wrought, his observation that Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed by a single day is a timeless warning against hubris, a warning that the present dispensations might well heed. And others as well.

untitledSeneca’s own life was so filled with contradictions that he was quite attuned to the fickleness of fortune and very sensitive to the whims of successive Roman Emperors, at least two of who – Caligula and Nero – who had ordered him to commit suicide… Therefore let the mind be disciplined to understand and to endure its own lot, and let it have the knowledge that there is nothing which fortune does not dare – that she has the same jurisdiction over empires as over emperors, the same power over cities as over the citizens who dwell therein. We must not cry out at any of these calamities. Into such a world have we entered, and under such laws do we live. If you like it, obey; if not, depart whithersoever you wish. Cry out in anger if any unfair measures are taken with reference to you individually; but if this inevitable law is binding upon the highest and the lowest alike, be reconciled to fate, by which all things are dissolved.

There is also hope in the stoic outlook. Already there are signs that some changes are afoot. Like Lyons, which eventually was rebuilt, “to endure and, under happier auspices, for a longer existence!“, maybe we will bounce back, and the JNU of the future will be an even  better University. Inshallah!

Death by Infantilization

The American poet bell hooks might have been speaking about the situation in JNU today: “Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

In my thirty plus years at JNU, I have rarely spoken in a public meeting, but when asked to do so on “What JNU has contributed in the Sciences” on 28 February this year, I felt I must. Partly because it is getting increasingly difficult to fight the losing battle of public perception versus ground reality, and also, because I was provoked by a recent public discussion on Lok Sabha TV, where blatant lies were broadcast, and the participants congratulated each other on their moral positions, each ever so smug and self-righteous.

Day after day there is an article in one or the other medium, with JNU faculty trying their best to explain just what the issues are to those who are not at JNU. This is not a case of “us” explaining to “them”, but there is more than a little schadenfreude in the point of view that cannot see what the fuss is all about. Not to mention a number of articles devolving around what-about-when-X-did-Y-to-Z…

jnuNone of which can account for the slow and painful killing of an excellent university. And what lies at the heart of this heinous action is the basic incomprehension of what a modern university is, or indeed what a modern Indian university should be.

When I moved to JNU in 1986, one of the main things that attracted me to the university was that it was a graduate school. The School of Physical Sciences was started that year by then Vice Chancellor P N Srivastava with the idea that it would be a school of studies that recognized no disciplinary boundaries within the physical sciences. Having been at places where (in today’s language) the silos were impenetrable, it seemed like more than a breath of fresh air. For mainly professional reasons and some personal ones, I was happy to move to JNU from the institute I was at in Mumbai.

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Some things about JNU seemed wonderful. The size, for one- it seemed to have so many more possibilities with four times the number of teachers and fifty times the number of students, not to mention the acreage, which was about fifty times as large as well. The number of disciplines – there were 8 Schools in JNU then (SIS, SLLCS, SSS, SES, SLS, SCSS, the old ones) and SPS and SAA, the new ones. There were some special Centres as well (some of which are now Schools in their own right), but the academic environment was rich compared to the smaller and more specialist campus I had been a part of in the preceding few years. It was a small matter that many people thought that we were a School of Physical Education, formed along with a School of Arts and Athletics… those were the initial days and we hardly cared.

The atmosphere was even more wonderful. This was a short enough time after 1983, and the memories of the earlier times were strong. The campus was politically alive, and the Ph D students who trickled into the School of Physical Sciences – 4 in 1987, 5 in 1988, maybe 6 or 7 in 1989, and so on – brought in the culture of the rest of the campus into our growing School. Our Ph D students of the early days were mostly all resident in the hostels, so we indirectly got to hear of what was discussed, the issues that were debated, and above all, we got to see first hand what an enabling campus the JNU was. Our students came from a very different demographic than the students at most institutes, and we could see first hand the change that JNU brought about in their lives, as indeed it did in ours.

kk1There were also some not so pleasant aspects of being at JNU. One was the two culture divide, caused in part by the huge disparity in size between the science Schools and the much larger Schools of International Studies, Language, and Social Sciences. The SPS was very small, even after we started the MSc in Physics, in 1991 or 1992. The students were younger and there were more of them, but still we were a mere ripple in the JNU, and some of the rules and regulations that were needed for a small cohort were not always in consonance with what the larger body had decided. But we went along, for the most part happy to be part of a public university, and adapting to the changes that were needed.

One of the most remarkable aspects of JNU was the position of students vis-a-vis the faculty. From the earliest times, the sense of participation of all students in university matters has been complete, be it at the level of governance or at the level of pedagogy- students have been able to participate in decision making, and indeed their opinions have been sought and respected. Most students (other than in the languages, that is) at JNU entered the university after a Bachelor’s degree elsewhere at the very least- and were therefore also adults for the most part. And they were treated as such, in terms of their responsibilities, in terms of our expectations of them, and in the way in which we dealt with them and their various issues.

images.jpegWhich is why, when in 2017 or 2018, the University administration does not condescend to talk to students let alone treat them as sentient beings capable of making their own choices, it seems an aberration. To be fair to the Administration (with the capital A) they do not talk to teachers either – unless one conforms to an archaic mode of conduct- but in the process, the entire University, teachers and students alike, is given the “Daddy knows best” line, and it is up to us to conform.

This process of infantilization is simply unacceptable.

It is tiresome to repeat the arguments of why the attendance issue is being misrepresented, and why it could and should have been done better, so I shall not. But as one who has taught at JNU for the past thirty or so years, I know that the real issue is of learning. Over time, the nature of pedagogy has changed, not just in JNU but also all across the world. The internet, the availability of online material, YouTube, Wikipedia, more books and better libraries- all of this has democratized the classroom as never before. To be sure, teachers are still needed, but our roles have evolved in a fundamental and significant way, something that the purveyors of attendance sheets cannot realize. The focus has to shift to evaluating outcomes fairly, to know what students have acquired and to ensure that they have learned the skills they need and not to ensure that they have 75% attendance. That is simply not the point, and in short, they.just.don’t.get.it.

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And regrettably, they cannot realize it because, at a deep and fundamental level, the real reason that they just don’t get it is because they simply are not very capable. It can indeed be difficult to have to cope with not being very good… being  fairly mediocre and knowing it can be a difficult cross to bear. The knowledge also that come what may, try as one might, one is never going to quite make the cut: When mediocrity is coupled with authority, the combination is toxic.

There are many things that need to change in JNU, and those that have lived with it for the past so many years are best placed to advise on what is needed and how best to make the change. The hostels need better administration, for sure. The fees need to be rationalised to a less embarrassing level: the JNU annual tuition fees have not changed in years, the hostel charges are unrealistic, and this is against a backdrop where salaries and scholarships have been growing, keeping pace with the growth of the economy in fair measure. One can list more, indeed several more things that need change, but this should, in the best spirit of the campus, be done through discussion, through debate. Not via edicts, and certainly not under the pretence of having had decisions passed in the Academic Council when they were not. Or by the fabrication, the fraudulent claim that letters of support were strongly endorsed when the eminent alleged signatories simply deny ever having done so.  A shame that it has come down to this.

There is a peculiar stillness in the University today – a disquiet and a lack of enthusiasm that does not bode well. Dialogue is out, and in some sections, so is hope. Many of the things that the old JNU fought for and implemented have been done away with, and the price to be paid is that the campus demographic will change significantly in these few years. And then, there will be no one left to care.